Where do you stand?

Would the world be better off with fewer patents?

"A world of fewer but more robust patents, combined with a more efficient method of settling disputes, would not just serve the interests of the public but also help innovators like Apple. The company is rumoured to be considering an iPad with a smaller screen, a format which Samsung already sells. What if its plans were blocked by a specious patent? Apple’s own early successes were founded on enhancing the best technologies that it saw, notably the graphical interface and mouse that were first invented at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre," we write in a leader in this week's issue of The Economist. Do you agree? Would the world be better off with fewer patents?

The patent system is abused. Take the issue of ink cartridges for printers. These machines are designed so only patent-protected cartridges will fit, and the manufacturers sell replacement cartridges at something like 20 times the cost of manufacture. This is not what the patent principle was intended for.

@JimfromOttawa
The inkjet printer-catridge model is actually an innovation in business model, turning what used to be "pay all up-front" model of photocopiers and impact printers into "pay as you go" model in which cartridge sale subsidises the main printer prices, to make entry easy but heavy use more costly. The logic here is, if you print so much that catrtridge costs are uneconomical, then you should be buying laser printers or other heavyweight printers instead.

If we reduce the patents, we reduce the incentive to generate knowledge, or at least to spread knowledge. I would rather just shorten the patents. While less knowledge would be generated, advances would be more quickly integrated into society in general. Really, making people rich is not the reason governments give patents. Governments give patents to benefit society.

I think that obtaining a (utility) patent should require *objective* evidence of non-obviousness. That means there would need to be evidence that the problem the patent claims to solve has been noted by others as a significant one, and has gone unsolved for some time.

This would be a relatively small change to the law -- one could easily argue that it better reflected the original intent of patent law -- and would make a massive difference in the area of software patents in particular. In software, the landscape is changing so fast that new problems are appearing all the time; and it has been easy for someone to identify such a problem, solve it in a technically straightforward manner, and obtain a patent on the solution. Such patents do not materially advance the state of the art, and we are inundated with them at the moment. Requiring hard evidence that others had attacked the problem without success would eliminate such patents and return the system to what it was intended for: protecting true technical breakthroughs.

You do realise the number of products (serving market niches, offering lower costs to consumers) that have been designed and prototyped, but have not made it to market because patent holders refuse licensing/ threaten lawsuits?

And you are aware of the vast number of spurious patents which are bought up by patent trolls (legal partnerships) whose sole business is to attack productive businesses (generally those too small to afford court cases/ legal costs), and extract horrendous out of court settlements (driving up consumer costs, driving small players out of the market).

The patent system has enormous costs - it's existence reduces today's current GDP by several percentage points. This must be weighed against the potential incentive effects - monopoly and market power conferred by patents make research and investment more attractive, presumably contributing to long run innovation and productivity growth.

In view of that trade off, could you possibly think that the present patent system strikes the balance right? In practice, there seems to be little doubt that we could improve matters: by making it much tougher to get a patent, restricting patents to actual technical rather than mere design innovation, restricting patents to non-trivial improvements on available technology, etc. And clearly, we need far less costly dispute resolution/ enforcement procedures.

I work in silicon valley and in the industry. When we, insiders, are out drinking beer on a friday night and shooting the breeze, mentioning intellectual property rights has always been a sure way to get someone to go on a rant. It is always fun to hear the stories about the idiotic patents that are out there. Something which people have been doing for 20 years and some idiot will patent it. My favorite was the friend who patented a new sorting algorithm. A few years later someone pointed out that he what he had actually done was rediscover quick sort. It would be as if someone got a patent for a spark plug. It shows that they clearly do not screen them in a meaningful manner.

The granting of a patent is not the end of the story. If a prior art is later discovered that anticipates the patented invention, the patent is liable to be invalidated. In your quicksort example, anyone using quicksort would not need to be worried about being sued by the patent owner.

Agreed it unenforceable but it is part of a parasitic drag on innovation.

That is the problem. We need meaningful patents that document real things. We need patents that have a shorter lifespan and are focused on a specific implementation. Not just fluff or broad style statements.

For a long time someone had a patent on triggering something when a line is disconnected. A buddy who made telephone head sets talks about how their competition bought that patent and how it tied their company in knots for years
Which gets back to my main point. The screening process has failed and it is hurting the American economy.

Patents are the only thing that large companies respect. There has to be a way for smaller companies to protect the investments that they make in R&D.

I understand that certain sectors feel that patents restrict innovation, but the real problem is that licensing isn't standardized. There is nothing stopping those sectors from establishing patent pools and working out some sort of deal analogous to musicians (inventors) and radio stations (a few cents per use). In fact, this is already happening.

I think patents allow to invest big amounts of money in research and development, there´s some abuse of course but that´s the price, I believe the system needs some rationalitation but not elimination.

American patent system is rather ridiculous. How on earth, round corners can be patented? How about cross tables with bar charts in cells? How about linear regression with business performance data? These are some examples of how American patent system is in caos. How Samsung's real inventions are not counted as FRAND while bogus Apple's inventions were acknowledged in the court. Samsung has the second largest number of US patents only after IBM. Still Samsung lost the case. Samsung has about 47,000 US patents while Apple has only about 1,700. Obviously Apple suposed to pay lots of license fees to Samsung. But thanks to european FRAND laws, it's the real innovator who is in receiving end in the patent war.

US patent office is issuing on ideas that we used to use for thousands of years. For example, in sales, we recommend customers other related products based on what they buy. Amazon patented this for online trading!

If you read the Apple design patents, there was no reference to round corners. At least the one I looked had just one claim. U.S. D504,889 claimed the following: We claim the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described.
The body of the patent stated the following:
FIG. 1 is a top perspective view of an electronic device in accordance with the present design;
FIG. 2 is a bottom perspective view thereof;
FIG. 3 is a top view thereof;
FIG. 4 is a bottom view thereof;
FIG. 5 is a left side view thereof;
FIG. 6 is a right side view thereof;
FIG. 7 is an upper side view thereof;
FIG. 8 is a lower side view thereof; and,
FIG. 9 is an exemplary diagram of the use of the electronic device thereof the broken lines being shown for illustrative puposes only and form no part of the claimed design.
That is it, you have just read the whole patent. No reference to rectangles or curved edges. It does however contain illustrations that look amazingly similar to the iPad, not just in proportions and shape, but also in screen, from side angles, etc. I do not think you would have seen that design prior to that patent being issued, or more likely, prior to the iPad announcement. I can assure you, the design in that patent looked nothing like your laptop, nothing like your transitor radio of day past, nothing like your walkman, and not even like an iPod. It is distinct.

The IT industry is basically now in a "patents gone wild" universe. It's insane how much companies like Google and Microsoft are paying for patents(to Motorola and AOL). And that's just a small piece of the pie. There are now lots of patent trolls out there as well, companies set up solely to buy and sell patents. Soon IT companies will have more lawyers than engineers.

In software, this is all so murky, everything is built on top of everything else. If you build a new app using Windows Foundation Class, should Microsoft be able to claim partial ownership of your creation? And why is Google completely absolved in the Apple/Samsung patent case? Samsung's smart phones are built entirely on top of Google's android. All the features are in one way or another defined by what's made possible in Android. At the end of the day, if patents were in place in the 1800s, the industrial revolution never would've spread to the continent then across the Atlantic. Taken to the extreme as it is now approaching, patents hinder rather than encourage innovation.

As far as drug patents, the strict patent law in the US essentially makes the US subsidize the entire world in drugs. We pay 3-10x as much as countries like Canada for the same drugs, all because of strict enforcement of patents in the US that is not enforced elsewhere. That's one main reason why our health care expense is completely out of whack compared with the rest of the world. It's time to make all other countries pay equally for our patents, and reduce cost for all Americans. Healthcare is sucking us dry. We can no longer afford to keep subsidizing the rest of the world like this.

The United States has led the world in innovation for more than 150 years. In fair measure that is because the United States has, by far, the most sophisticated and successful patent law in the world. That fact is, itself, a tribute to the remarkable far-sightedness of two great statesmen, who also happened to be sometime-inventors: Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

There are roughly 150,000 US patents granted every year. However the relative handful that are litigated in big electronics cases create a splash in the newspapers, and give an entirely misleading impression to the public.

The fact is that for the overwhelming majority of inventors and companies the patent system of the United States works better than any other patent system anywhere.

The Economist, and others, could perhaps publish accurate statistics that would put the issues in proper perspective, and then this misleading nonsense might stop.

Benjamin Franklin: "That we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of Others," he once wrote, "we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."

The USA have lead the world in innovation because this land was always able to attract the best minds from all over, to this very day admitedly. Immigration law has played a much bigger role than IP.

I would put drugs into a separate regime as investments relate as much to regulatory filing as to the cost of discovery. All other inventions should be required to be licensed on a FRAND (Reasonable and non-discriminatory) basis. The fee reflects the cost of developing the idea. No monopolies. Obvious and trivial patents should be more ruthlessly discarded.

In theory. But you clearly have never been involved in a patent trial, or have ever read the transcripts of one.

A good lawyer can make even the most trivially obvious engineering solutions seem non-obvious for a non-technical jury. The invalidity determination is not made by a judge as a matter of law, it is made as a determination of fact by the jury.

Your simplistic understanding of the system is completely divorced from the reality of how patent law ACTUALLY operates and the expense of actually trying to fight against patent trolls in America today.

Perhaps you would benefit from talking to actual entrepreneurs who are involved in building companies in America. Surely as inventors themselves they would agree with you if the patent system was serving their interests.

I agree with SpasticDravidian. Many patents are "solutions" that any competent practitioner would come up with to deal with a specified problem. These patents in effect define the problem rather than an invention. I am not suggesting changing the conditions you refer to above. Just make sure they're applied with rigour.

I believe that patents should be limited time benefits (like leases though not in the strict sense of the word) given to the inventor (or to whosoever he sells the idea) and then should become free for all. Lets say a period of 10-12 years. This will allow the corporation to get a huge head start and will not hamper the competition as it will automatically become open source after the lease expires.

Renewed is really not the proper term. If company X has a patent claiming an invention with features A, B and C, then they can get another patent by adding a feature D, as long as the new combination is not obvious. But so can anybody else. And if company Y patents ABCD before company X does, then company X will be prohibited from practicing ABCD.

Here is an interesting patent law concept for you: So Microsoft lost their patent and anti-competition case in Europe. In the process Microsoft learns that they can place a patent on the computer windows screen as you see it.

Now it is bad enough that Microsoft copied Lotus and Wordperfect to create Excel and Word, but as it turns out the base software for the spreadsheet and word processor is well over 20 years old now, so it would be tough to fight any patents over software similar to Excel and Word.

So.... Microsoft has changed the visual setting of Excel and Word in their latest update for one reason alone: because they know that you can download Open office for free and get free Spreadsheet and Word processor software and Microsoft can no longer charge you for 20 year old software. Thus "IF" the public gets use to the new layout that has a copyright and patent then Microsoft may have an excuse to continue charging money for virtually no value add.

And that's how you get the patent laws to work in your favour without really "inventing" anything.

Actually the question has asked a wrong question. The major difficulty arises because of the absence of any pricing mechanism of patent. The pricing must not be regulated but at least must follow some guidelines of transfer, use, truncation and duplication.